January 17, 2009: Pulling a Double on a Saturday

So much for a nice, relaxing weekend.  I was woken up at eight this morning by my boss calling to let me know that we had a massive disaster at work over the last few hours and that it was all hands on deck.  By a quarter after eight I was down in the basement office (where it is freezing cold) and on a conference call.

My day turned into not only a full work day but it was, in fact, a double work day.  I had originally had some work scheduled to take place this morning but that had to be pushed off as normal work can not occur while there is an outage going on.  That would just add to the chaos.

Today’s issue was caused by the extreme cold conditions in Manhattan this morning.  We were sub-zero before the sun rose this morning.  As often happens when things get this cold, pipes start to freeze which can cause ironic overheating situations when HVAC systems fail or flooding when ice blocks water moving in pipes.

I got a little break in the middle of the morning while waiting between conference calls when I got to play a little bit of Oblivion while keeping an eye on emails.  I didn’t really get to see Dominica, Liesl or Oreo at all today as they were all still asleep during the only break that I had.  I did get to come upstairs and eat lunch and dinner with them but that was about it.  As soon as food was finished I had to head back down to the basement to get back to work.

After fifteen hours things finally cooled down enough (figuratively as well as literally) at work that I was able to start on the work that I was originally going to do first thing this morning.  Wow.  This was just a ridiculously long day.  Almost all of it was spent on the phone.  I had my headset on almost all day.  I went through several handset batteries.

Work continued on into the evening.  In total I ended up working over sixteen hours today!  It was after midnight that my very last server came online in the datacenter.  I officially did nothing but work today.  This was one of the busiest days at the office that I can recall.

Dominica, Liesl and Oreo all went to bed before I was done working.  You know that it has been a long day when the people who got up after you are going to bed while you are still working.  I can barely keep my eyes open as I sit here wrapping up SGL for the day.  I am very, very tired of sitting at my desk.  This has been my longest stretch at my desk since we moved to Peekskill.

Tomorrow I am definitely attempting to sleep in and to take it easy all day.  I really need a break after today.  There is a very high liklihood that there will be residual problems from today’s disaster that will need my attention tomorrow but I anticipate that they will be few and far between.  As long as I get to sleep in in the morning then everything should be okay.

Okay, off to bed for me.  All appears to be right with the world.  I need some Boston Terrier snuggles.

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